Creating the ideas to innovation learning laboratory : a first-year experience based on research

Engineering graduates will play a leading role in tackling the major challenges facing society, nationally and globally. Their achievement of this goal will require a broader set of knowledge, abilities, and qualities, which will require schools or colleges of engineering to attract a more diverse and representative cohort of students to study engineering: students who are passionate about making a difference in the world and who collectively are highly creative and imaginative as well as analytical. To achieve these goals--a more diverse student body, motivated and equipped to rise to the challenges ahead--we need a new approach to how we transition this next generation of engineers into our programs of higher education. Presented in this paper is a new first-year experience that has been conceived and designed to accomplish these goals based upon research. Particular attention was paid to the use of: learning spaces, how students are engaged in the learning process, and the use of learning technologies. The new first-year experience is a strategic response to the numerous calls to action for engineering education published in recent years. Industry has concluded that business as usual will not enable it to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by globalization in an uncertain world. Equally, education as usual will not deliver the graduates that this nation and world need if we are to meet these challenges.